Tag Archives: fire

Sunak sacks Zahawi: he wouldn’t go so he had to be pushed

Out: Nadhim Zahawi.

This is probably the least interesting political story of the weekend because we all knew it was coming.

Even though Rishi Sunak is a weak prime minister – he has to maintain support from all the different factions of the Conservative Party and that means he has to appease them – Nadhim Zahawi had put himself in an untenable position.

That’s what the ethics advisor, Sir Laurie Magnus, found anyway:

The PM said Sir Laurie Magnus’s inquiry made clear there had been a “serious breach of the ministerial code”.

Rishi Sunak asked for the probe after Mr Zahawi admitted paying a settlement to HMRC, including a penalty.

Sir Laurie said the MP had missed many chances to be open about his tax.

In his report for Mr Sunak, he wrote: “Mr Zahawi’s conduct as a minister has fallen below the high standards that, as prime minister, you rightly expect from those who serve in your government.”

Sir Laurie cited Mr Zahawi’s failures to update his register of interests until more than a year after HMRC started looking into his taxes.

When Mr Zahawi reached a settlement with the taxman in August 2022, this too should have been declared, Sir Laurie wrote.

After receiving the findings, Mr Sunak wrote to Mr Zahawi to say he had decided to remove him from government.

Mr Zahawi thanked the prime minister and said he took pride in his role in the vaccine rollout and the Queen’s funeral – but did not offer an apology or mention his tax affairs.

In fact, Zahawi took the opportunity to attack the media, in his letter to Sunak.

Here’s a TV report on this story:

Commentators are saying it is impossible to envision a circumstance in which Zahawi will return to frontline politics.

Good riddance.

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Firefighters reject below-inflation pay offer and will ballot on strike action

Dept. of Below-The-Attention-Of-The-BBC: I saw this tweet from Fire Brigades Union general secretary Matt Wrack…

So – nurses are to strike, civil servants are to strike, and now the fire brigades are preparing to do the same.

I clicked across to the BBC website to read the report on what this means for the Tory government in what is fast shaping up to be a Year of Discontent among working people.

Nothing.

Fortunately, other news purveyors have been quicker off the mark. Here’s the Evening Standard:

FBU general secretary Matt Wrack, said: “FBU members have spoken. This result, on a two-week turnaround, shows that there is remarkable strength of feeling amongst firefighters and control staff on this derisory pay offer.

“The ball is in the employers’ and Government’s court. There is still an opportunity to resolve this dispute and we will be writing to Fire Ministers and Government departments across the UK requesting urgent meetings.

“We have firefighters using foodbanks. Our members worked through the pandemic to help protect their communities, taking on extra duties to do so.

“A further real-terms pay cut is an absolutely disgusting way to thank them. Whilst strike action is always a last resort, our members simply can’t go on like this.”

Source: Firefighters reject 5% pay offer, paving way for ballot on strike action

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Tory Britain: we can’t afford to eat every day and we’re setting fire to our homes, trying to keep warm

Secret smile: Boris Johnson probably thinks it is very funny that his policies have made more than two million people unable to afford to eat every day, and that some people have set fire to their homes while trying to heat them by burning timber indoors.

You may wish to bookmark this article so you can send it to anyone who tries to tell you voting Conservative is a good idea.

Because more than 12 years of Conservative government has laid the once-great United Kingdom lower than it has been in decades – possibly more than a century.

More than two million people – one in every seven adults – can no longer afford to eat food every day:

More than 2 million adults in the UK have gone without food for a whole day over the past month because they cannot afford to eat

The latest survey of the nation’s food intake shows a 57% jump in the proportion of households cutting back on food or skipping meals over the first three months of this year, with one in seven adults (7.3 million) estimated to be food-insecure, up from 4.7 million in January.

And fire brigades are now overworked dealing with blazes in houses where people started burning timber in open fires because they could not afford the cost of central heating any more:

A man in south-west London set fire to his property by burning timber in his living room to keep warm.

The man was trying to avoid putting on the central heating in his home, fire investigators said.

Fuel poverty campaigners said the incident – one of at least 100 involving open fires, log burners and heaters in the capital in the last few months – laid bare “the harsh and dangerous reality of the cost-of-living crisis”.

Some might say that they don’t care; these incidents involve other people. It’s very easy to throw shade on others by saying they are unable to keep their finances in order.

But the Tory cost-of-living crisis affects us all.

Food costs more because of Brexit-related supply issues; housing costs more because the banks have increased interest rates, meaning mortgages and rents are going up; heating costs more because of the shortage of gas created last winter and accelerated by the Russia-Ukraine war; we are paying more tax to the Tory government than any UK population in more than 40 years.

Only people who are extremely rich can afford to blame others for being unable to stay warm or feed themselves in these circumstances. If you’re on a normal wage, you’ll feel the pinch soon enough.

And it’s all due to Conservative economic incompetence – sold to you with a lie that they knew what they were doing.

Or was it a lie? How much worse would you find it if this enforced starvation and these house fires were intended to happen by Boris Johnson and his party?

Source: More than 2m adults in UK cannot afford to eat every day, survey finds | Food poverty | The Guardian

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Tories oppose ban on ‘fire and rehire’ – supporting oppression of employees by foreign bosses?

Apologies for using the ‘foreigners own UK businesses’ line but it is important to make the point that Brexit hasn’t stopped people from foreign countries interfering in employment practices here.

On the contrary – foreign ownership of UK businesses and assets is higher than ever. Weetabix was taken over by a US corporation four years ago – after the decision to quit the European that was motivated partly by a (racist) desire to stop foreigners from taking our jobs.

How is it better for foreigners to dictate increasingly worse pay and working conditions for people in this country?

And why is the UK’s Tory government – that pushed through Brexit as a way to counter foreign interference – supporting the exploitation of our workers via fire-and-rehire?

It doesn’t make sense, does it?

Look:

Exploitative bosses? Our Angry Yorkshireman must mean the Americans who are now in charge of Weetabix:

So, what’s the message?

Johnny Foreigner coming to the UK to do work that British people won’t touch is bad…

But Johnny Foreigner owning UK businesses and attacking employees’ pay and conditions is good? For whom? It certainly isn’t helping you.

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After embracing ‘fire and rehire’, Labour is now embracing ‘zero hours’ contracts too

Starmer and Rayner: we were told they were ‘taking the knee’ in a publicity stunt for Black Lives Matter but this image could equally be taken as them kneeling before employers’ group the Confederation of British Industry and vowing that they will never allow the Party of the Workers to actually stand up for workers’ rights, prevent exploitation, and/or seek acceptable pay and working conditions. They are a danger to you.

Keir Starmer (and his deputy, Angela Rayner) really are dragging the Labour Party into the mire, aren’t they?

Already they have hypocritically launched a policy to abolish odious ‘fire and rehire’ employment practices, ignoring the fact that they are carrying out such an exercise, within Labour, at the moment.

And now Rayner has announced that the party is reversing its policy on ‘zero hours’ contracts so that employers will be allowed to continue exploiting workers by forcing them to work only when it suits bosses, without access to employment conditions including sick pay and holidays.

So passes the Party of the Workers: not in struggle but in subversion by fake socialists who belong in the Conservative Party.

Way back in 2016, former leader Jeremy Corbyn announced that under him, Labour would abolish ‘zero hours’ contracts. He said a Labour government would legislate to ensure that all employees be given guaranteed hours which must be specified and written into a contract – bringing an end to zero-hour contracts.

If an employer wanted workers to work beyond those hours, they would have to specify the length of additional work along with a reason for asking.

An employer would also have to give reasonable compensation, akin to an “on-call” payment to an employee, for agreeing to make themselves available for additional work, whether they were ultimately asked to do so or not.

Now Angela Rayner has swept all that away.

Asked on the BBC’s Today programme if Labour still opposed ‘zero hours’ contracts, Rayner refused to give a straight answer, and ended up saying that the party now opposes “exploitation” of them:

That can only mean Labour does not oppose ‘zero hours’ contracts any more. It is a wholesale endorsement of worker exploitation by employers.

It means that, in a few short words, Angela Rayner betrayed Labour’s reason for existing.

Considering the party’s contradictory attitude to ‘fire and rehire’, commenters and commentators have only one conclusion to draw: that Labour has changed policy because it intends to use ‘zero hours’ contracts itself:

If Labour wants people to work for the party in the run-up to a general election under such conditions, then Labour won’t help working people if it is elected.

Nobody at all should want to work for Labour in such a situation.

We should all spurn Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and all their right-wing cuckoo cronies, as we would spurn a pack of rabid dogs.

In the long term, the rabid dogs would be less harmful to us.

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Isn’t Labour’s new employment policy hypocritical, as Starmer practises ‘fire and rehire’?

Keir Starmer: a Tory in a red tie?

How can Keir Starmer seriously propose banning ‘fire and rehire’ policies by employers when he has brought that odious practice to the Labour Party?

This Site reported on July 21 that Starmer has almost bankrupted Labour, making it necessary for the party to axe 90 full-time jobs.

At the same time, Starmer was hiring 30-50 staff on short-term contracts. I stated:

That’s ‘fire and rehire’ because you know some of the axed staff will have been doing the same work that the new employees will be asked to do – and some of these jobs will be occupied by the same people.

The mainstream media has picked up on this, with The Independent reporting on it only a day or so ago.

How tone-deaf, then, for Starmer to send his deputy leader, Angela Rayner, out to promote a policy that condemns ‘fire and rehire’!

Consider this, from the BBC’s article on the new policy:

Labour also says it wants to outlaw “fire and rehire” practices whereby employers dismiss workers and then offer to hire them back under new, often poorer, terms and conditions.

That is exactly what Starmer is doing.

The new policy has other holes that have led critics to claim that it is merely tinkering around the edges of employment law and not revolutionising it at all.

For example, the “real living wage” of £10 per hour has been attacked as not being enough to lift anybody out of dependence on state benefits or – in extreme cases – food banks.

This is simply not good enough.

Under Jeremy Corbyn, Labour devised policies that would have changed the UK from a country that exploits its population for the benefit of a tiny minority – which is what it is now, and don’t you forget it – into a progressive, trailblazing nation that valued all of its citizens.

Our success as a nation would have been valued, not by the number of billionaires we had, but by the absence of poverty.

But Starmer isn’t interested in this.

His plan isn’t revolutionary. It is hypocritical and so is he.

And the truth of that is clear to everybody.

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Keir Starmer LIED that he wouldn’t attack fellow Labour members, and he LIED about opposing ‘fire and rehire’

Apt: Keir Starmer reckons he was named after original Labour leader Hardie – but can anyone doubt that his illustrious forerunner might have said these words, if confronted with evidence of Starmer’s abysmal performance.

What else is NuLabour’s suit-in-chief lying about?

Starmer is on the record as saying he opposes ‘fire and rehire’ – the practice of firing employees, only to offer them their old jobs at a significantly reduced pay rate and/or with worsened working conditions.

But at yesterday’s (July 20) meeting of Labour’s ruling National Executive Committee, he pushed through a plan to axe 90 full-time jobs, while also taking on 30-50 staff on short-term contracts.

That’s ‘fire and rehire’ because you know some of the axed staff will have been doing the same work that the new employees will be asked to do – and some of these jobs will be occupied by the same people.

And what work will they be doing?

They will be identifying members of the Labour Party whose left-wing/socialist tendencies make them likely candidates to be victims of Starmer’s next purge.

But Starmer promised he would not attack party members too – didn’t he?

Yes, he did!

So he stands revealed as a liar and a hypocrite.

We already have such a man making a complete mess of running the UK.

Nobody is going to vote for Labour if it is only offering a Hobson’s Choice of the same evils with a different face.

POSTSCRIPT: You’ll notice that the 90 Labour staff who lost their jobs were the lowest-paid. This is because Labour refused to take a single penny from the salaries of its overpaid elite senior apparatchiks:

That is Tory employment practice.

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Tory hypocrisy: they can’t sort out fire safety in your flat after Grenfell, but support huge payments to redecorate Johnson’s

Grenfell: this is what happens when inflammable cladding on tower blocks catches fire. Tenants in many more blocks have had this stuff inflicted on them, and the Tories want to force them to pay to get rid of it.

Isn’t it typical of the Tories that they’re happy to nod through possibly corrupt funding of Boris Johnson’s flat redecoration, but won’t protect people in blocks of flats from fires like that at Grenfell Tower?

They have just been knocked back – yet again – by the House of Lords, who have voted to shield residents of tower blocks from fire safety costs.

MPs had rejected the Lords amendment but, after their fourth defeat on this subject, it will now be reinserted into the bill.

The bill modifies a previous law to clarify that building owners must manage and reduce the risk of fire in their properties.

However, last week the House of Lords added an amendment which sought to ensure building owners do not pass on the costs to leaseholders and tenants until a support scheme is in place.

Housing minister Chris Pincher described the amendment as “ineffective and defective”, claiming that it would prevent any remediation costs from being passed to the leaseholder, even in instances where the cost was very minor – such as replacing a smoke alarm.

As a tenant in a rented property myself, I can inform Mr Pincher that my landlord pays for the cost of replacing the smoke alarm here as a matter of course.

It should not be used as an excuse to continue denying tower block tenants improvements that could save their lives.

And it could – because there are only hours left before the end of the current Parliamentary session, when the Bill will be dropped – unless the Tories decide to carry it over to the next session (which seems unlikely to This Writer).

All of this takes place in the shadow of the row over prime minister Boris Johnson’s own flat. Who pays to replace the smoke alarm there?

Tory MPs would have been happy to let £200,000 be paid, just to redecorate the rooms above 11 Downing Street, with no questions asked.

But members of the public have pointed out that this means they are happier for huge amounts to be paid on a single person’s flat – if that person happens to be one of them – than for cash to be spent on potentially life-saving work for many people.

That’s not a good attitude to have with an election next week.

Source: Grenfell: Government defeated on fire safety costs bill – BBC News

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Police inspectorate skewed report to support government clampdown on protests – claim

Whistleblower: this image is representative (the revelations in the article were made by a woman). Many whistleblowers suffer for their principles, in spite of assurances that this won’t happen. It will be interesting to see what happens to Alice O’Keeffe’s career from now on.

The timing is exquisite.

On the day This Site published an article about allegations that a report on institutional racism was scripted by the Tory government to support a lie that there isn’t any in the UK, a whistleblower attacked another report – on the policing of protests – saying it was scripted by the Tories too.

The claim is a huge blow to the credibility of HM Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services. Another blow to its credibility is the fact that it will apparently examine whether there is any truth to it.

For clarity, whistleblower Alice O’Keeffe has said

The official policing inspectorate showed repeated bias in favour of the police and against peaceful protesters…

[The report] was skewed in favour of the government view, with conclusions reached before evidence was gathered and assessed.

The civil service code was breached.

HMICFRS told the home secretary in a private letter it backed the need to change protest laws five months before its report was published.

Some in the inquiry team… likened peaceful protesters to the IRA, which waged a terrorist campaign against the UK.

Ms O’Keeffe’s written complaint was made as HMICFRS worked on a separate report on the policing of a vigil for Sarah Everard. She said the biases she had seen left her fearing a report into the policing of the vigil would be a whitewash.

And, as we have seen, it seems she was right.

That report totally exonerated the police and found fault with those of us who criticised police violence against and manhandling of women at the Clapham Common vigil.

HMICFRS has defended itself by claiming independence – based on nothing more than reputation. But reputations can be broken by facts.

And Ms O’Keeffe has spent five years working for the police inspectorate, so it is reasonable to believe she may know her subject.

Well, I hope she made copies of her evidence and put them in a safe place because if HMICFRS holds any information corroborating her claims then you can bet the hard drives have been wiped and the hard copies shredded already.

The upshot of all this is that in the short term we have another reason to distrust a police service that seems to be working for a totalitarian Tory government – and against us.

And in the long term?

We can expect another report that whitewashes the Tory-supporting inspectorate and gives us even more reason to live in fear of our government and the police force that smashes our heads in its name.

Source: Police watchdog accused of skewing report to back protests clampdown | Police | The Guardian

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You clapped NHS workers – now they face scummy ‘fire and rehire’ plan to worsen work conditions

There could not be a more striking example of the truism that a battle may have been won but the war continues.

Late last month, This Site celebrated British Airways’s decision to end ‘fire and rehire’ tactics.

Today I saw this, from Zarah Sultana – one of Labour’s remaining worthwhile MPs. I include the follow-up tweet for its relevance:

They were referring to a decision by a National Health Service hospital in Birmingham to fire its porters – unless they sign new contracts that put them on worse pay and conditions.

Around 140 workers, who are members of the Unison union, have been told that they must accept new, rotating shift patterns or face redundancy.

Heartlands is part of University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Trust, which is headed up by former Labour home secretary Jacqui Smith.

The city’s eight Labour MPs have written to Smith condemning the firing and rehiring.

Rightly so. ‘Fire and rehire’ is one of the lowest employment practices permitted in the United Kingdom.

It is only permitted because the Conservative government allows it – and actively uses it in the NHS.

That’s the same Conservative government whose members hypocritically stood in the street and clapped NHS employees every Thursday for many weeks last year.

It seems Tory gratitude only lasts as long as a photo opportunity.

That’s how they can be beaten, of course. They hate bad publicity.

And this should be all over the headlines. Why isn’t it?

Is it because the Tory media are suppressing it?

Well, if you fancy a bit of homework, how about doing something to raise the profile of this issue, like asking your favourity newspaper, TV or radio channel where their coverage is?

Source: Heartlands hospital porters defy threat of the sack from bullying bosses

Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.

https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/mike-sivier-libel-fight/

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Buy Vox Political books so we can continue
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The Livingstone Presumption is now available
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HWG PrintHWG eBook

Health Warning: Government! is now available
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The first collection, Strong Words and Hard Times,
is still available in either print or eBook format here:

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